Showing posts tagged with Smart Home

When building skills with the Smart Home Skill API, you may have found it challenging to test and validate your skill's Lambda responses. To help ease these pain points, we’ve built the Alexa Smart Home Skill API Validation Package, available now to all smart home-skill developers.

We are happy to announce tunable lighting control, a new feature in the Smart Home Skill API now available in the US with support for the UK and Germany coming soon. This is great news for those of you targeting color-changing lights or tunable white lights.

Today we are happy to announce lock control and query, a new feature in the Smart Home Skill API now available in the US, with support for the UK and Germany coming soon. This feature is supported with locks from August, Yale, Kwikset, and Schlage as well as hub support from SmartThings and Wink. Now any developer targeting devices with locking behavior can enable customers to issue a voice command such as, “Alexa, lock the front door.” In addition, developers can build in support for customers asking for the status of a smart locking device with a voice command such as, “Alexa, is the front door locked?”

Much like the recently announced thermostat query feature, the lock query feature simplifies development efforts by enabling specific voice interactive experiences straight from the Smart Home Skill API. This is accomplished under the new Alexa.ConnectedHome.Query namespace.

Developers can report errors using the same namespace. These errors are then used to guide the customer with the proper corrective actions. It’s crucial that developers return meaningful and correct errors so that customers can feel confident about the status of their locks.For example, if the smart locking device is unable to provide a stateful value because a door is open, developers should report this in their directive response as shown below.

Today we are happy to announce support for thermostat query, a new feature for Alexa skills developed using the Smart Home Skill API. The feature is now available in the US, with support for the UK and Germany coming soon. With thermostat query, customers can issue a voice command to an Alexa-enabled device, such as the Amazon Echo or Echo Dot, and hear Alexa say the response. For example, a customer with a single thermostat could say, “Alexa, what is the temperature in the house?” and Alexa would respond with the current inside temperature. This complements thermostat commands that already allow customers to set the temperature value.

This new feature simplifies development efforts by enabling specific voice interactive experiences straight from the Smart Home Skill API. In the past, smart home skill developers had to create two skills (one for smart home, the other for custom voice interactions to allow querying data) to provide this overall experience.

Earlier in the summer, Ashwin Karuhatty reached out to a group of connected home integration professionals in the Custom Electronics Design and Installation Association (CEDIA). Karuhatty, part of Amazon’s Smart Home business development team, wanted to encourage integrators to develop new Alexa skills for the connected home. CEDIA’s annual conference was an ideal place to start.[Read More]

With Amazon Alexa, developers are creating novel and delightful voice experiences for customers. University students are rethinking the way we live. Meet
Adam Betemedhin, an Electrical Engineering major, and
Kevin Duong-Tran, a Computer Science major, from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV). Adam and Kevin, along with roughly 20 other students from multi-disciplinary backgrounds at UNLV, are participating in the
2017 Solar Decathlon, a competition sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy that will culminate in October of this year. [Read More]

Landon Borders, Director of Connected Devices at Big Ass Solutions, still chuckles when he tells customers how the company got its name. Founder Carey Smith started his company back in 1999, naming it HVLS Fan Company. Its mission was to produce a line of high-volume, low-speed (HVLS) industrial fans. HVLS Fan Company sold fans up to 24-feet in diameter for warehouses and fabrication mills.

“People would always say to him ‘Wow, that’s a big-ass fan.’ They wanted more information, but they never knew how to reach us,” says Borders. So the founder listed the company in the phone book twice, both as HVLS Fan Company and Big Ass Fans. Guess which phone rang more often? “In essence, our customers named the company.”

Today the parent company is Big Ass Solutions. It still owns Big Ass Fans. It also builds Big Ass Lights and Haiku Home, a line of smart residential lighting and fans. Now with an Alexa skill, the company’s customers can control their devices using only their voice.

Creating the world’s first smart fan

Haiku Home is where Alexa comes into the picture.

Big Ass Fans (BAF) is a direct-sales company. As such, it gets constant and direct feedback about customers' satisfaction and product applications. BAF found people were using its industrial-grade products in interesting commercial and home applications. It saw an exciting new opportunity. So in 2012, BAF purchased a unique motor technology, allowing it to create a sleek, low-profile residential fan.

That was just the starting point for BAF’s line of home products. The next year, BAF introduced Haiku with SenseME, the world’s first smart fan.

What’s a smart fan? Borders says it first has to have cutting-edge technology. Haiku Home fans include embedded motion, temperature and humidity sensors. A microprocessor uses that data to adjust the fan and light kits to the user's tastes. The device also has to be connected, so it includes a Wi-Fi radio.

The smart fan joins Alexa’s Smart Home

The microprocessor and Wi-Fi radio make the SenseME fan a true IoT device. Customers use a smartphone app to configure the fan’s set-it-and-go preferences. But after that, why should you need an app?

Borders remembers discussions in early 2015 centered on people getting tired of smartphone apps. Using apps were a good starting point, but the company found some users didn’t want to control their fan with their smartphone. BAF felt voice was definitely the user interface of the future. When they saw Amazon heavily investing in the technology, they knew what the next step would be.

They would let customers control their fans and lights simply by talking to Alexa.

In 2012, a “Down Under” team from Melbourne, Australia recognized LED lighting had finally reached a tipping point. LED technology was the most efficient way to create light, and affordable enough to pique consumers’ interest in bringing colored lighting to the home. And LIFX was born.

John Cameron, vice president, says LIFX launched as a successful Kickstarter campaign. From its crowd-funded beginnings, it has grown into a leading producer and seller of smart LED light bulbs. With headquarters in Melbourne and Silicon Valley, its bulbs brighten households in 80 countries around the globe.

Cameron says LIFX makes the world’s brightest, most efficient and versatile Wi-Fi LED light bulbs. The bulbs fit standard light sockets, are dimmable and can emit 1,000 shades of white light. The color model adds 16 million colors to accommodate a customer’s every mood.

From smartphone apps to brilliant voice control

Until 2015, LIFX customers controlled their smart bulbs using smartphones apps. Customers could turn them on or off by name, dim or brighten them, and select the color of light. They could also group the devices to control an entire room of lights at once. Advanced features let customers create schedules, custom color themes, even romantic flickering candle effects.

Without the phone, though, customers had no control.

Like Amazon, the LIFX team knew the future of customer interfaces lay in voice control. “We’re always looking for ways to let customers control [their lights] without hauling out their phone,” said Cameron. “When Alexa came along, it took everybody by storm.”

“That drove us to join Amazon's beta program for the Alexa Skills Kit (ASK)” says Daniel Hall, LIFX’s lead cloud engineer. Hall says the ASK documentation and APIs were easy to understand, making it possible for them to implement the first version of the LIFX skill in just two weeks. By the end of March 2015, LIFX had certified the skill and was ready to publish. The skill let customers control their lights just by saying “Alexa, tell ‘Life-ex’ to…”

Since the LIFX skill launch, ASK has added custom slots, a simpler and more accurate way of conveying customer-defined names for bulbs and groups of bulbs. Hall says that custom slots is something that LIFX would be interested in implementing in the future.

Today we are happy to announce the support for scenes, a new feature in Alexa skills developed with the Smart Home Skill API. With scenes, customers can issue a single voice command to an Alexa-enabled device such as the Amazon Echo or Echo Dot to set a predefined configuration of one or more devices to a desired state. For example, a customer could say, “Alexa, turn on bedtime” resulting with specific lights turning off, a bedroom light changing color to a low-lit orange-hue, a ceiling fan turned on, and the temperature changed to an ideal setting for sleep.

At first glance scenes might appear similar to the groups feature found in the Smart Home section of the Alexa app as both allow control over multiple devices with one voice command. However, scenes differ from groups in the following ways:

Scenes allow each device configured within it to be set to a desired state, whereas groups are stateless and simply turn devices on or off.

Scenes are configured by customers through a device manufacturer’s app, whereas groups are configured in the Alexa app.

Scenes only contain devices managed by the device manufacturer’s app, whereas groups can contain any device discovered in the Alexa app.

With scenes customers have another option to groups for controlling multiple devices. Customers may already have scenes configured in device manufacturer apps such as those provided by Control4, Crestron, Insteon, Lutron Caseta, SmartThings, or Wink. Prior to today, these scenes were invoked by using the device manufacturer’s app. Now customers can find these scenes listed as devices in their Alexa app after requesting device discovery and control via voice interaction.

How Scenes Work

Figure 1: Scene control process

Once a customer has configured a scene through the device manufacturer’s app and requests a device discovery to Alexa, the scene name will appear in the device list in the Alexa app. Consider what happens from a developer perspective, when a voice command is made to turn a scene on.

Let’s examine each step above in more detail.

Customer says, “Alexa, turn on bedtime.”

Alexa service receives the request and routes this intent to the Smart Home Skill API.

A directive is composed including the ‘TurnOnRequest’ name in the directive header and the appliance ID (located in directive payload) corresponding to the friendly name of the scene “bedtime.”

The skill adapter hosted in AWS Lambda receives the directive. Included in the directive is an access token to determine the customer’s account making the request. A call is made to device cloud API to turn on the scene matching the appliance ID for the associated customer.

The device cloud (likely owned by the device maker) receives a request from the skill adapter, and communicates to a device hub or controller to turn on the scene preconfigured by the customer.

The device hub sets the desired state of each device configured by the customer. Note in this “bedtime” example, turning on a scene may result in turning off a light, since this could be the desired state of that device for the scene.

Today’s post comes from J. Michael Palermo IV, Sr. Evangelist at Amazon Alexa. You will learn how to respond to control directives in code to turn devices on or off, set temperature, and set percentages.

When you build a skill with the Smart Home Skill API, the ultimate goal is to control a device. That control can include turning a device on or off, setting a temperature, or setting a percentage, such as when you’re dimming a light bulb. This post will cover the general process of device control and teach the fundamentals by demonstrating control of the ‘on’ or ‘off’ state in code using Node.js.

This technical walkthrough is a continuation in a series of smart home skill posts focused on development. Please read and follow the instructions found below to reach parity.

How Device Control Works

Figure 1: Device control process

Once a customer has properly installed, configured, and discovered all smart home devices, verbal control commands can be issued to an Alexa-enabled device, such as the Amazon Echo. Consider what happens from a developer perspective when a control command is made, such as turning on a light.

Let’s examine each step above in more detail.

Customer says, “Alexa, turn on desk light.”

Alexa service receives the request and routes this intent to the Smart Home Skill API.

A directive is composed and contains, among other things, the ‘TurnOnRequest’ name in the directive header and the appliance ID matching the friendly name “desk light” in the payload.

The skill adapter hosted in AWS Lambda receives the directive. Included in the directive is an access token to determine the customer’s account making the request. A call is made to device cloud API to turn on the device matching the appliance ID for the associated customer.

The device cloud (likely owned by the device maker) receives a request from the skill adapter, and communicates in its own fashion to the device identified by appliance ID to turn on.